Reanimator
CURATED BY ELIZAVETA SHNEYDERMAN AND ANTHONY DISCENZA
AUGUST 16 - NOVEMBER 9, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION AUGUST 16TH, 6-8 PM
statement -
All motion-based visual media is constructed from still images; film and video cameras do not record continuous motion but merely sample static points of time at brief intervals, relying on the brain glitch of persistence of vision to reconstruct the semblance of motion from these non-moving frames. In this sense, all film and animation is an illusion, a trick of the eye. The space in between two frames is a space of suture, of reanimating the lifelessness of static images.
Reanimator explores the idea of “animating” as emerging from the interpolation of space between static frames that both the brain and various image processing technologies perform. The exhibition also considers the ways in which the many technological systems that have developed around the representation of plasticity over the past century—predominantly emerging from the fields of cinema and animation—have, in turn, influenced visual and cultural aesthetics in other areas of cultural production. In this way, the exhibition constitutes a map of this influence, revealing the complex negotiations that determine what gets crystallized into an image and what kind of subjects are produced by the process.
Hybridizing museological display strategies with the vernacular of an in-situ production environment, the exhibition presents works from fourteen contemporary artists working in sculpture and media alongside a collection of production objects culled from the cinema and gaming industries. These non-art objects, drawn from the interstitial spaces of different production methodologies, map the often-unseen connections between technologic determinism and visual aesthetics.
By staging dialogues between these different arenas of output, Reanimator locates the uncanny echoes emerging from tropes and patterns of production that have become hard-wired into the visual regime of cinema and animation and considers the various ways they have, in turn, re-informed conceptions of fluid, speculative bodies. Collectively, the contents of the exhibition examine the complex feedback loops between our subjective imaginations and the supposedly rational technologies of visual representation.
Participating Artists -
Collin Leitch, Maja Cule, Gregory Kalliche, Olivia Mole, Filip Kostic, Michele Gabriele, Andy Bennett, Nicole Ross, Harris Rosenblum, Rhonda Holberton, Andrew Ross, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Frank WANG Yefeng, and Coco Klockner.
ABOUT THE CURATORS -
Elizaveta Shneyderman is a Belarusian-American curator, researcher and publisher. She is Curator at the Riga Technoculture Research Unit (RTRU) and Curator-at-Large at Kim? Contemporary Art Center (Riga, Latvia). Shneyderman’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the history and philosophy of media materialities and the techniques that emerge from them, including their influence on contemporary visual culture. Her essays on contemporary art and visual culture have been published in Artforum, Animation Studies Journal, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, PIN-UP Magazine, and Rhizome, among others. Shneyderman has previously held curatorial positions and contributed research to exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, EMPAC, PARTICIPANT INC, Hunter East Harlem Gallery Kunsthalle.Ost, and Mana Contemporary. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College and is currently Adjunct Professor of Art History at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a psychoanalyst in formation at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics.
Anthony Discenza is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in western Massachusetts. In addition to his own practice, he also runs the residency/project space lower_cavity
